Coverage metrics for requirements-based testing

Michael W. Whalen, Ajitha Rajan, Mats Per Erik Heimdahl, Steven P. Miller

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In black-box testing, one is interested in creating a suite of tests from requirements that adequately exercise the behavior of a software system without regard to the internal structure of the implementation. In current practice, the adequacy of black box test suites is inferred by examining coverage on an executable artifact, either source code or a software model.In this paper, we define structural coverage metrics directly on high-level formal software requirements. These metrics provide objective, implementation-independent measures of how well a black-box test suite exercises a set of requirements. We focus on structural coverage criteria on requirements formalized as LTL properties and discuss how they can be adapted to measure finite test cases. These criteria can also be used to automatically generate a requirements-based test suite. Unlike model or code-derived test cases, these tests are immediately traceable to high-level requirements. To assess the practicality of our approach, we apply it on a realistic example from the avionics domain.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ACM/SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2006, Portland, Maine, USA, July 17-20, 2006
PublisherACM
Pages25-36
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)1-59593-263-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2006

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